The increased use of technology and computers has generated a corresponding increase in digital data. This ever-increasing digital data requires a corresponding ever-increasing amount of storage space.
The need for storage space for digital data has been fueled through many changes in society. For example, home computer users increased storage of multimedia data, especially video and photographic data, has served to increase the amount of storage space needed. Likewise, industry also requires increased storage space. As more and more business is being conducted electronically, there has been an ever-increasing demand and need for the storage of this vast amount of business data. Furthermore, there has been a demand to digitize the storage of once paper files in an attempt to decrease the overhead cost of this paper generation and storage.
With this increase of digital data, there has been a corresponding further need to back up the digital data. One approach to backing up digital data uses locking mechanisms. However, using locking mechanisms, the time that a system is down is generally intolerable for systems that have large amounts of digital data. Therefore, more efficient backup mechanisms, known as snapshots, are commonly performed. Snapshots allow for quick and efficient capture of digital data. However, there is presently no comprehensive approach for troubleshooting snapshots when they do not work as expected.